A brief teaching update

I thought I might update you on the progress of my teaching in this summer session; it's absolutely amazing, and far better than I could have anticipated. My students, though generally confused by the theory I've been throwing at them, have being engaging with it to the best of their ability. I always enjoy grading, because I actually like reading their assignments. Perhaps I am doing them a diservice by not teaching them traditional memo writing form and testing them on it. But really, it is much more enjoyable to teach them the rhetorical aspects of business writing and ask them to put those into play with contexts and audiences in ways that are meaningful to them. Plus, they are far more interesting to read.

So, we have one more week where we talk about grammar and the job search, and then we are off to the wonderful world of web design and my final semester experiment, a collaborative web project with my entire class. We'll see how it goes!

Medium, expanded

This post on Datacloud about what is a medium, is money a medium, and is transportation a medium has expanded my thinking about media in general. Since it's the topic my class in currently on, there will be a lot to do with it this week. I bet if my students were able to think of other things as media, besides paper-type media, and even box-type media, they might be able to do even more amazing work. I barely feel smart enough to say something intelligent about the topic now, as it's Friday, and after a week of teaching, I am now officially brain dead. I need the weekend to revive.

I have also started reading this history of computers & composition book that Gail gave me, and it's hard to read because they have a narrative, but then they have all these cool quotes in the margins, and my brain can't switch gears fast enough. I know I'm losing a lot of interesting stuff here. But I'll just include this first quote they have in the margins in my blog, because it also works really well with what we're currently doing in my class:

A revolution in communications technology is taking place today, a revolution as profound as the invention of printing. Communication is becoming electronic. For untold millenia, man [sic], unlike any other animal on earth, could talk. Then, for about 4,000 years, [humankind] also devised ways to embody speech in written form that could be kept over time and transported over space. Then, with Gutenberg, the third era began, and for the past five hundred years written texts could be disseminated in multiple copies...We are now entering a fourth era ushered in by a revolution of comparable historical significance to that of print and the mass media. We have discovered how to use pulses of electromagnetic energy to embody and covey messages that up to now have been sent by voice, picture, and text. Just as writing made possible the preservation of an intellectual heritage over time and its diffusion over space, and as printing made possible its popularization, this new development is having profound effects on civilization. (Pool, 1990, pp. 7-8)

A rather long quote, but what strikes me about it most is again this idea of time and space, and how techology deals with those two factors, and transforms our understanding of those two factors. Perhaps even the tension over technology and its inherent "evilness" is its transformation of time and space, thus critics always want to return to an earlier time where the pace of life was slower. In terms of business writing, it is a good point, because I told my students yesterday that the nature of writing has changed, but this quote is a clear historical point as to why. Interesting, interesting.

Lectures

I'm overwhelmed with excitement, and super sad Sarah is cleaning rooms right now because I just want to call her and express my excitement. Today, I gave my first lecture ever. Last semester I sat & watched both Sarah & Jody give lectures in their classes, and it was awesome. The best lectures I'd been to that I could think of. Well, I did that today. I had 5 pages of single-spaced notes and I talked for almost the entire class. There was a little discussion sprinkled into the lecture, but it was mostly me. After class, I told them it was my first lecture, and they said it was great, better than most because they could follow it, and that just made me feel so happy. I think I was able to make a lot of connections for my students today that will help them continue to make connections for themselves. I love them. They're really great. I'm so glad I'm teaching BTW 250 again. I thought I wanted to leave it behind, but really, I can teach it and many other things. I'm learning a lot about what I'm able to do in my teaching.

good-bye bell

I've finally finished Teaching to Transgress (took me about 6 months, go figure) and I'd like to quote bell hooks and just mention that this book is wonderful, though 10 years old, still very relevant, at least to me. And so

It saddens me that colleagues are often suspicious of teachers whom students long to study with. And there is a tendency to undermine the professorial commitment of engaged pedagogues by suggesting that what we do is not as rigorously academic as it should be. Ideally, education should be a place where the need for diverse teaching methods and styles would be valued, encouraged, seen as essential to learning. Occasionally students feel concerned when a class departs from the banking system. I remind them that they can have a lifetime of classes that reflect conventional norms. (203)

decisions, decisions

Ok, so I actually made a decision today (amazing!) I found out they are no longer using the Writing Material reader in Rhetoric, which I was actually considering using. But since I have no interest in using the other reader (Ways With Words or some such thing) I'm going to change the focus of my course and be a little less risky for my first semester. I'm going to do a lot of writing technologies readings. They'll fit in just fine with the projects I had planned, will be easier to collect, and I can work around the Writing Analytically stuff too. I may also choose to dump the Web Design part of the course. So far this semester I've barely taught web design, and have been able to use the room to its fullest. So yay. Less stress, more direction.

Now I just have to get over the fact that I have to teach from a book which actually has a section called "Why Correctness Matters". UGH!!!!!

Things that fascinate me

I am recently fascinated by Asian culture. I want to travel to Europe, and Asia, so much, out of America, and see more of the world. I've lived a few places in America. I love American culture. But Asian culture seems fascinating, different, out of my grasp. Movies give me the illusion that I can grasp it and then it quickly slips away.

From Lost in Translation I can see that Tokyo seems like an amazing city. From Platoon I can see that Vietnam is jungles and villages and not anything like western culture. And from Farewell my Concubine, I can see that China has had such a recent changing of governments and rich history, not to mention the sheer volume of people! From my mutterings you can see how little I know about Asian culture.

I also love the West Wing and everytime I watch I wonder why I'm not in politics fighting with these smart people. What is up with the decision I made to do academia? I want to go work for Kucinich and then he makes an amazing comeback and becomes the candidate, and then the president? It's all a fantasy world I know, but it's fascinating. And it makes me cry.

Not to mention once again how fascinated I am by hospitals. Weird thing, I actually would like to go spend a lot of time in hospitals right now. Especially Carle. Carle is a great hospital. But nobody likes hospitals. Well, I'm in love with them right now. And I can't explain it.

Communicating, & Hospitals

I am distressed, but as of yet I have no response that I will be given help on how to incorporate the required texts into my syllabus. Blah.

I graded my first set of student assignments last night. They weren't able as a whole to achieve what I wanted, and it's entirely my fault. I used to have a boss who never knew what he wanted until he saw what he didn't want. That's me in this case. I think they did their best to give me what I asked for, but I didn't ask for what I wanted. Instead, I asked for a disconnected and random piece of writing. But had they been able to give me a connected and meaningful piece of writing, they would have done outstanding work. Their ideas were beyond what I could have imagined in this project. What to do, what to do... I haven't decided how to grade these. They have the option to revise... I don't know.

I was in the emergency room Tuesday night with food poisoning. Hospitals fascinate me. They run on writing. They communicate by writing, not just in charts, but on walls, doors, beds, machines... There are so many rules, so many things that must be done a certain way. There are no Geordi LeForges altering the equipment to make it perform in certain circumstances. My current fascinations are leaning towards medicine, bodies, technologies & writing. The physical is so affected by the writing, and the writing is so much more physical than it is in many professions. When I worked for lawyers, we rarely were allowed to do things like write on the walls.

Politics, & a bit on language

I find myself in a very difficult position right now. I have finally begun to come into my own in teaching business writing. My students this summer are great, and the work we've done in only the first week is better than anything I've participated in as a teacher. I signed up to teach Rhetoric next semester because I felt I wasn't able to go where I wanted to with business writing.

Well, because it is my first semester teaching Rhetoric, even though I've taught for 2 years and taken a ton of courses on composition (since Writing Studies is my focus), the department still feels I need a lot of guidance in my teaching. They're willing to allow me to have my own coursepack (although they want to "supervise" the readings), but they're forcing me to incorporate Writing Analytically and a handbook. Well, that's basically going to cost my students more money, force me to teach something I'm not comfortable with, and make less room in my syllabus for the things I actually want to teach. I had planned to teach in the lab and teach web design, and had already put in a book order to require my students to buy a Dreamweaver book. I don't want to require them to buy all this. It's very expensive and pointless. And it's frustrating the heck out of me.

I like this quote:

In academic circles, both in the sphere of teaching and that of writing, there has been little effot made to utilize black vernacular--or for that matter, any language other than standard English. (171)

I wonder what would happen if I started submitting papers where every other line had a Yiddish word in it. I wonder what would happen if I broke into full paragraphs of computer languages. I wonder how folks would respond to even the use of language from different disciplines within their own discipline. Do we care to take the time to learn the subtleties beyond our language control? Wouldn't we grow a lot as a society that way? Although academia, really, is not about growing as a society. It's about control, as evidenced by the politics I am currently encountering. What would it matter if my department actually trusted me to teach this course? I would be a happier, better teacher, and would be able to bring out happiness & betterness in my students as a result. The only thing that might suffer is their egos. What a bummer.

Online stuff

Well, I spent about 1 hour on Friday photoshopping an image for my class website, but then I decided to shrink it, and now you can't read it anymore. I'll have to re-do that soon. I had a lovely weekend of vacation by the pool and shopping and IKEA, so I've been a bit out of the loop on my blogging. And teaching is all time consuming right now. I can't spend 4 hours in the morning sitting around anymore. If you'd like to be all consumed by my teaching as well, I thought I'd put up a link to the course website, where you can also find your way to our blog.

Bodies and liberatory practices

hooks collaborates with Ron Scapp on this amazing chapter called "Building a Teaching Community." There is so much here, I found myself underlining and writing plenty of notes in the margins, fully enagaged. Thus is the goal of liberatory pedagogy as hooks sees it, creating a space where students can become fully engaged.

I've really been reminded here of the importance of bodies. Is teaching not really "work" because it is supposed to be mental and not physical? How do our assumptions of the way we are supposed to be physically in the classroom determine the kind of work we can do there? What if we can move around, use the space differently, uses spaces outside of the classroom? What if we can be with our students rather than occupying only the front of the classroom? And how does the way I look and move in the classroom contribute to my delivery of the material? How does teaching in the computer lab change this, and what are the assumptions of how to use the space in the computer classroom? And what do I do with this?

I know so many prefessors who are progressive in their politics, who have been willing to change their cirriculum, but who in fact have resolutely refused to change the nature of their pedagogical practices... they will work with texts, work with the ideas they share, in ways that suggest there is ultimately no difference between this work and more conservative work emerging from folks privileged by class, race, or gender. (140-41)

That reminds me so much of my Women's Studies class last Spring. I liked the professor, and she presented a lot of interesting readings on feminism that were progressive and liberatory. But we could not engage them in any productive way. We could barely enter a conversation, and whatever started was constantly shutting down other conversation. It was awful. I'm sure I'm guilty of this as well at times. Why is it so easy to admit the old ideas aren't working, and yet not be able to change them in our physical practices?

The world of digital portfolios

My students have been doing portfolios in my class since the first semester I taught, when they told me I had to stick to a traditional model of grading that to me seemed to set up an adversarial relationship between me and my students. I couldn't take it. Grading pulled all the wrong strings, and seemed to go directly against any model of process we constantly harp on in composition.

My students have been doing electronic portfolios since my second semester teaching. I started teaching in a computer lab, and have slowly helped my students get better at representing their work digitally. At this point, I can't imagine going back to a traditional model of grading, and I can't imagine teaching anywhere but in a computer lab. It has fundamentally changed the way I think about work.

And my conception of portfolios keeps changing. As does Kathleen Blake Yancey's. Her current article in CCC is fantastic, putting into words a lot of my own thoughts and goals for my teaching. Strangely enough, she is talking about the very things I've been addressing on my blog, delivery changing and disappearing from print, and reemerging with the onset of digital forms of writing.

What I plan to do now in my teaching of portfolios is work more at letting my students do the representing in ways that are meaningful to them. It's easy enough for them to imitate my syllabus and arrangement of texts on a website. But as this article talks about, there may be many more things my students could do with these very public and immediate (hyper)texts. And I am initiating the use of collaborative portfolios for my teaching, to see the ways that my students might represent themselves as a class. But as Yancey states:

...the medium is suggestive rather than deterministic. The virtures of the digital outlined here are more potential than realized, but this articulation demonstrates potential for a new identity, one not fully determined by medium, but possible within and through it. (753)

Yeah. The brilliance is all over these ideas. I have a lot to think about.

Experience

I'm currently working on my Rhet 105 syllabus. The theme of my course is going to be Personal Writing in Public Spaces. I am in the process of choosing readings, and as I haven't chosen any yet, I am trying to consider ways to encourage my students to theorize and look critically at the personal, as well as using the personal to understand the world around them. So I find hooks discussion of "Essentialism and Experience" particularly relevant to this debate I'm having in my head. hooks seems to be saying that there must be a balance with the personal, that experience is important in what it can add to a course, but must be looked at critically. I agree.

In much of my reading on pedagogy, I find good teaching seems to come back to the way a teacher presents things in class. Different teachers can present the same things, and through their practices, convey those things in entirely different ways. As I work on what to present, I must also work on how to present it. In academia, the how has not been an issue: you present a paper at a conference, or you submit a paper to a journal. Papers generally look the same although may vary in style based on where you present it. But the how has been generally unimportant, and generally uncritiqued (although Writing Studies folks do this more and more; Anne Wyscoki is one example).

As I read this quote, I thought again that perhaps some of what might change the way we think in academia is to change how we write:

...largely because critics fail to interrogate the location from which they speak, often assuming, as it is now fashionable to do, that there is no need to question whether the perspective from which they write is informed by racist and sexist thinking, specifically as feminists perceive black women and women of color. (78)

Wouldn't it be something if our writing practices could do this? Couldn't we possibly abandon the forms of writing that create hierarchies and exclude? Probably a lot of wishful thinking on my part.

"Theory as Liberatory Practice"

In my "Feminist Theory in the Humanities" course last spring, we read "Theory as Liberatory Practice" by bell hooks in class. Those who spoke up in this class (and there weren't many; there was a lot of silencing by the theory we read in that course) criticized this essay, especially the section in which she claims the way we read theory in women's studies courses is analogous to rape. They also criticized bell hooks and quickly wrote off her work. I knew I was in trouble, because every moment while I was reading this essay, I kept nodding my head, underlining bits, and feeling that her theory was granting me a place in that course. How wrong I was...

In light of the recent experiences of myself and my friends who are graduate students just starting out in this world of academia, I find this quote to be quite reassuring:

There were many times early on when my work was subjected to forms of dismissal and devaluation that created within me a profound despair. (72)

I truly want the academic work I do to be connected to practice. I am in Writing Studies for this reason; sitting in a small room with an individual and helping them work out their ideas in writing was a way to put academic work into practice for me. I try to put these purposes ahead of all the other crap that comes up, because there is a good reason for me to do the work I want, and although that may not seem "academic" or "theoretical" enough, it might help someone else. As hooks so eloquently says in this essay, what is the point of theoretical work that nobody wants to read and has no real application in peoples' lives?

Is critique the only way?

hooks says:

...critical interrogation is not the same as dismissal...It is feminist thinking that empowers me to engage in a constructive critique...(49)

A lot of times when I read, I read for how the text can be of use to me. Does it change the way I think about something? Can I use it in my teaching? Does it illustrate points I already believe to be true? Do I feel inclined to dismiss everything, and why?

Sometimes it seems the way I read is not typical in academia.

But I agree with hooks. Are there ways to critique that are constructive? Are there ways of looking at a text that allow me to take what I need and ignore the rest? I often feel like I do not fit in when I sit in classes where we rip everyone to shreds. Not to say that everyone is right all the time, but everyone is certainly not wrong all the time either. Perhaps a better balance can be struck.

Explicit teaching philosophies

I'm reading bell hooks Teaching to Transgress, and I'll probably have occasional things of note to post here. Today I read this:

In the transformed classroom there is often a much greater need to explain philosophy, strategy, and intent than in the "norm" setting...In my professorial role I had to surrender my need for immediate affirmation of successful teaching (even though some reward is immediate) and accept that students may not appreciate the value of a certain standpoint or process straightaway (42)

We recently discussed this first issue on my blog as I expressed some fear about the ways I have revised my business writing class for the summer. But the second issue here is what I'd really like to address; after having one awful semester teaching, I'm even more concerned about what my students think of my teaching. It is comforting to think that even bell hooks struggles with this issue. I know I work hard on my teaching. I know that I care what my students learn, that the material they engage and the ways they engage it can allow them to leave my class with a better understanding of how the world works, and that requires, as hooks states later

...the opportunity to know that difficult experiences may be common and practice at integrating theory and practice: ways of knowing with habits of being (43)

Well, the current business writing cirriculum uses very little of the theory and the practice is so abstract that in my mind there must be better ways for students to learn these things. But there are many more pieces to this puzzle that I'll just need to learn over time.

Is work supposed to be satisfying?

I've been feeling rather unsatisfied with my academic work as of late. Perhaps it is because I have no good product to point my finger to and say I accomplished this year (even though I wrote an esssay review and book chapter with the promise of publication, still, those things are not a journal article which is apparently what I need to be original). I have my nose in so many interests at this moment; it's hard to settle down. It's hard to commit myself to something when I'm broadly interested in feminism, technology, personal writing, professional writing, pedagogy, and that's just to name a few. I met with Gail last week, and she gave me a book. A book is a good thing. But mostly I just want someone to tell me it's going to be ok.